Marketplace or DTC? The 2026 Squeeze on EU & US Sellers

Marketplaces took 83.4% of global e-commerce sales in 2025, up from 81% two years earlier, while first-party online stores fell to 16.6% (ECDB). The gravity is real: most customers now start and finish on Amazon, a platform marketplace, or a marketplace inside an app. For an SME, that pulls hard toward selling where the buyers already are. But the marketplace path just got heavier, and the choice deserves more thought than “go where the traffic is.”

This is the marketplace-versus-DTC decision for 2026, with the new rules priced in.

Marketplace gravity is intensifying

The pull toward marketplaces is structural, not a fad. Buyers trust the checkout, the returns, and the search. ECDB’s 83.4% is on the high end — eMarketer’s more conservative read still puts marketplaces around two-thirds of global e-commerce — but every serious estimate points the same way: the share of commerce flowing through platforms you don’t own is rising.

For a small brand, that’s a genuine advantage. You can reach a market without building demand from zero. The cost is that you’re a tenant. The platform sets the fees, owns the customer relationship, and can change the rules. That trade is fine — as long as you make it on purpose.

Selling on EU marketplaces now carries real compliance

Here’s what changed. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, marketplaces must verify seller identity before you can sell, run checks for illegal or unsafe products, and suspend repeat offenders. The enforcement is not theoretical: the European Commission fined Temu €200 million in May 2026 for failing to manage the risk of unsafe products, and fined X €120 million in December 2025 in the first major DSA penalty (European Commission). Breaches can reach 6% of global annual turnover.

Why does a platform fine matter to you, the seller? Because platforms push that liability down. Expect stricter identity checks, faster takedowns, and less tolerance for borderline listings. The compliant seller wins shelf space the platform can no longer risk giving to the careless one.

And the product rules apply wherever you sell

The EU’s General Product Safety Regulation, in force since 13 December 2024, requires every product sold in the EU — marketplace or your own site — to have an EU-based “Responsible Person,” safety information in the listing, and action on safety issues within two working days (trade.gov). There’s no DTC loophole here. Run your own store and you carry the full compliance load yourself; sell on a marketplace and you inherit its enforcement of the same rules.

This is the part founders miss when they romanticise DTC. Owning the customer also means owning the compliance, the returns, and the legal presence questions that a marketplace partially absorbs.

How to choose: marketplace, DTC, or both

• Lead with marketplace when you’re entering a new region cold, your category is search-driven, and you need volume to validate demand before investing in your own funnel.
• Lead with DTC when your margin can absorb customer-acquisition cost, your brand and data are the moat, and repeat purchase is high.
• Run both when you can — use the marketplace for discovery and the DTC site for margin and retention. Most durable SME brands end up here.
• Whichever you pick, sort the EU Responsible Person and DSA identity requirements before launch, not after a takedown.
• Re-check landed cost: with the US having ended sub-$800 de-minimis, cross-border parcel economics changed for everyone.

The honest trade-off

There’s no clean win here. Marketplaces give you reach and absorb some operational burden, but make you a captive tenant subject to fees and rule changes. DTC gives you control, data, and margin, but you pay to acquire every customer and carry every compliance obligation yourself. Anyone selling you one as the obvious answer is selling you their tooling.

The realistic 2026 posture for most SMEs is hybrid, sequenced: marketplace to find the market, DTC to keep the customers worth keeping. Just go in knowing the compliance bar rose on both paths, and budget for it.

Bottom line

Decide marketplace-versus-DTC deliberately, market by market, with the new EU rules and the end of cheap cross-border parcels priced in. Use platforms for reach, your own store for margin, and treat compliance as a launch requirement rather than a later surprise. The squeeze is real — the brands that plan for it keep more of what they sell.

If you’re weighing marketplace versus DTC for the EU or US and want a straight answer for your category, that’s what our free audit is for.

Marketplace, DTC, or both?
Book a free 30-minute audit and we’ll map the right channel mix and the EU compliance you need in place before launch. Get your free audit →

About the author: Daniele Antoniani is the founder of The Sharing Lab, a borderless studio that gives SMEs access to world-class global talent without agency markups or office overhead. He spent 15 years building affiliate programs and e-commerce partnerships across Europe and North America before founding the Lab.